Mechanisms of Sensory Working Memory: Attention and Perfomance XXV

I was pleased to be asked to visit a remote, beautiful, verdant, and earthy location to give the symposium lecture at a conference on something researchers rarely discuss as such: the sensory aspect of working memory. Is there such a thing? Why is it rarely referred to in this way? First I will discuss terms and what they mean, with a short modern history of the usage of these terms and a general theoretical framework to organize the data. Then I will discuss three categories of memory: (1) brief-duration sensory afterimages; (2) more persistent, processed sensory recollections; and (3) abstract units or chunks constructed across sensory modalities. In my theoretical framework, there is a great deal of commonality across sensory modalities despite the differences. For someone like me with an interest in human experience, this sensory memory information is of obvious relevance. Sensory information ties together experience and memory. Imagine, for example, a child moving a flashlight in a circular motion in the dark. The trail of light that results appears to exist in the present, but it is actually a sensory record of the path that the light has taken in the previous second or so. Illustrating the general appeal of sensory processing to curious minds, it may have been the first aspect of psychology to capture my imagination, as shown in a selection of pages from a booklet that I assembled for a science assignment in grade school (Figure 1).